Emmanuel Macron facing the Algerian puzzle

For every French president, the triangular relationship with Algeria and Morocco is an unstable balance that must be handled with great caution and moderate expectations. Will the year 2024 go down in history as the year in which this balance, so difficult to maintain, was disrupted? The arrest of Boualem Sansal is both an attack against France, the hated former colonial power, against Emmanuel Macron, who naturalized the writer in person this year, and against the values ​​of democracy.

It is a new stage in the conflictual link between Paris and Algiers, which reaches for the first time so directly the cultural sphere. In Algiers, the anger of those in power is also directed against Kamel Daoud, also a naturalized Frenchman and a fervent critic, like Boualem Sansal, of Islamism. While two complaints were recently filed in Algeria against him, his Goncourt prize is interpreted as a political choice…